A D Journal 1986

        Bob, my Fotomat boss, is going west, a wise move, although Pauly doesn’t think so. Bob, already approaching 40, needs to break away from his parents, and the military philosophy his father had imposed upon him for all of his life. Bob is a staunch Republican; I’m not. But I’m more conservative than half the left-wing whackos I grew up with, just as Bob is not nearly as fanatic as his father. Still, Bob and I get into it from time to time when he starts waving the American flag under my nose. He loves the free market system. I hate all systems. It only gets worse from there. He’s always dredging up the worst abuses of the welfare state, and I might agree with him if he refrained from claiming that is what happens every day. The left is just as bad, ranting and raving about cops, and the Reagan war machine, and – my God that age old piece of bullshit – Watergate. Maybe it’s Bob’s upbringing that twists him up inside. He has a tough time dealing with...

      I recall her handing me my birthday present over the back yard fence that birthday when I was seven and forced to get my first holy communion by myself because the week before I had caught measles when the rest of my class at St. Brendan’s got theirs. I wore my white suit and posed for pictures on the back porch when she – a few years younger than I was – called to me from her backyard to tell me she had a present for me. Her family had moved into the house next door about a year before I was born, though they were the only neighbors I ever knew, and I assumed they had been there forever, leaving for South Jersey during the Summer of Love after their patriarch, Bill the telephone installer, passed away, she vanishing from my life though I continued to think of her each time I returned to the old house, even later, even after the remnants of my own family fled for South Jersey, too, and strangers occupied both houses – the house next door to my old house would ...

    I didn’t know what a rebound man was until after I started dating Suzanne and her mother pulled me aside to warn me, “This won’t last.” The woman liked me; she didn’t want to see me get hurt because her daughter’s leaping out of a long-time relationship with her high school sweetheart and into the arms of an older man (me), part of that transition that comes after graduating college and people seek to leave their childhood toys behind. Most of all, she ached to escape her parents’ house, using me as leverage that she would eventually also shed when the time came. College had made her a feminist, and she often put down her mother for her old-fashioned ways.   While she loved her father, she disliked his dominance. She felt so much more superior to them, to a blue-collar life style she saw as degrading, and made her judgement from the ivory tower of college she had reached, and they never could, worse, never wanted to reach. My friends saw her as far too cau...

    When I think of Marcy, I think of the old Elton John song, but instead of all the girls loving Alice, tender young Alice, they say, I hear, “All the boys love Marcy, tender young Marcy,” because we did, and she was as tender as all that. She was the darling of Passaic for years, one of those married women, who oozing some pheromone that drew horny men to her, driving her insanely jealous husband even more insane. Not that he was all that bright, a pompous, self-centered violent man who like to lord it over other people, always accusing her of doing things she didn’t do, only vaguely aware of just how appealing she was, how her presence in a room affected every other man in it, and how each man vied with every other man for her attention, right under her husband’s nose. Of course, she was aware of our attraction, basking in it a bit perhaps because of the abuse she took in those dark nights alone with her husband over his imagined discretions, partly as revenge agai...